Fiction podcasts the next big thing – for listeners sick of image saturation and writers fed up of scripting low-budget movies. Facebook and Hollywood are all ears

Eighty-one years after The War of the Worlds, audio fiction is having a moment, and top-tier actors are in on it, like Rami Malek in survival podcast Blackout

Some production houses script stories with an eye to their screen potential; others, such as Spotify’s Gimlet, are focused on exploiting audio’s potential

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Rami Malek, who in February won the Oscar for best actor, features in a podcast series called Blackout. Podcast films and television series are becoming more popular in Hollywood. Photo: AP

Published: 8:00pm, 11 Oct 2019Updated: 8:00pm, 11 Oct 2019

Two years ago, podcasts devoted to fiction were a blip on the radar, but the genre is gaining momentum – under the watchful eye of Hollywood, which sees it as a hotbed for new movies and television series.

There are only a handful of fiction podcasts, almost drowned out by the talk shows, true crime, science and history series, but their numbers and quality keep going up – Blackout, Passenger List, Carrier to name some recent entries, soon to be joined by Motherhacker or Frontier Tween.

“It’s something we hoped would happen, and now we’re seeing it really gaining momentum and traction,” says Rob Herting. He founded a production company, QCode, barely a year ago, and already it boasts several successful series, including Blackout, in which a massive electrical outage threatens the very foundation of society.

A major sign of interest in this new format are the top-tier actors – such as Rami Malek (Blackout), who in February won the Oscar for best actor – lending their voices to audio fiction series.

Julia Roberts stars in Homecoming. Photo: AP

Just two years ago, “when I started, nobody was thinking about fiction shows”, says Mimi O’Donnell, who is in charge of the genre at Gimlet, a production company bought by Spotify in February. But she has seen an influx of writers, including “creators that have never done anything in audio but are really well-known in film, TV or theatre”.